Saturday 25 February 2006 18.45 EST
First published on Saturday 25 February 2006 18.45 EST

Freud once suggested that a house, when summoned in a dream, represents the soul of the dreamer. This is certainly true of writers, who make a profession of dreaming, and whose houses often reflect their spirit long after they have departed the premises. I've always been fascinated by houses where writers have lived and worked, and have made far-flung pilgrimages to many of these sites of significant dreaming. One longs to sit in these houses, to wander their dark corridors and look out of their windows, to observe their peculiar angle of vision on the outside world.

Over the decades, I've gone many times to Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott's baronial castle in Melrose, Scotland, with its grand exterior, its lofty rooms and medieval-looking turrets - an embodiment of the author's capacious, romantic spirit. I often think of Scott's double-sided desks, where two books could be on the boil at once: a testament to his prodigious, overreaching nature. I've visited several of Charles Dickens' houses, as well as Victor Hugo's sumptuous house on the Place des Vosges, in Paris. (Hugo's Hauteville House on Guernsey, where he spent nearly two decades in exile, still lies ahead, a destination long anticipated.) Quite recently I stopped by Bateman's, Rudyard Kipling's 17th-century manor house in east Sussex, and I've also been to his massive clapboard house in Brattleboro, Vermont - where (somewhat incongruously) he wrote The Jungle Books at a desk overlooking a snow-filled pasture. A few year ago, on a visit to Key West, in Florida, I sat by the pool at Hemingway's tropical villa, with its countless wild cats and dense palm enclosure. One can easily imagine Papa up in his study, sweating over the proofs of For Whom the Bell Tolls. On a recent visit to Oxford, Mississippi, I sat at William Faulkner's rickety desk at Rowan Oak, his antebellum house, observing the peculiar light in August - which gave rise to the title of a novel (although the phrase also may refer to the fact that a pregnant cow may be "light" of its foal or calf in August if it should give birth in that month).

As a biographer of Robert Frost, I made a point of visiting his many houses. Several summers in a row I lived for a period at the Homer Nobel Farm in Ripton, Vermont - Frost's main residence from 1938 until his death in 1963. I loved soaking in the claw-footed tub in that old farmhouse, and could easily imagine Frost in the same bath, listening to the wind in the bushy hemlocks outside the bathroom window. Once, while sitting on the porch with my youngest son in early evening, a couple from New Jersey wandered up to the steps. "Wasn't this the home of a famous writer?" asked the woman. "Yes," said my seven-year-old son, "Stephen King used to live here."

It's not only dead writers whose houses have haunted me. Being in the profession, I have many friends who write, some well known, others not. It doesn't matter. I study their houses with a keen attention, trying to discover connections between their life and work. It amazes me how often a house will reflect a writer's spirit. For example, I've known Gore Vidal as a friend for many decades, and have never ceased to marvel at his choice of houses. Until recently, when he moved to Los Angeles, he occupied an imposing villa in southern Italy called "La Rondinaia", meaning "swallow's nest". Bought by Vidal in 1972, the villa clings perilously to a cliffside, with aerial views of the Amalfi coastline from Salerno to Capri.

Vidal lived there like a Roman emperor in exile, grandly, remotely. You can't get to the villa by any normal road. A car could not drive up to the door. It takes a good half-hour to walk from the piazza in Ravello to the house, down narrow, tortuous streets, along a pine-redolent footpath, then through an iron gate into magical garden. A grand cypress alley leads toward the house itself, a white stone mansion on five floors. Vidal always seemed amused by the difficulty of access, and proud of the house itself, which was built in the late 19th century by the daughter of an English lord.

Inside, the villa has high-ceilinged rooms, and many of them have unique views of the coastline. Vidal's study - my favourite room in the house - was a capacious room with a view. His desk was a long trestle table, usually stacked with books. Vidal doesn't type or use computers; he writes, instead, on yellow legal pads in blue ink. There was a stone fireplace opposite his desk, and a log fire often blazed there through the chilly winter months. Behind him were rows of reference works and a complete set of Henry James, one of his favourite authors. Photographs of Vidal from various magazine covers adorned one wall, and there were pictures of old friends and relatives who visited the villa, including Jackie Kennedy, with whom he shared a stepfather. Paul Newman, Rudolf Nureyev, Princess Margaret, Tennessee Williams, Lauren Bacall, and the ghosts of countless other former houseguests haunted the corridors.

The flavour of ancient Rome permeated the setting and decor but one also felt the presence of the American past in the furniture and, indeed, the books. First editions of modern American authors, many of whom Vidal knew well, lined the walls, and the furniture in his bedroom included an empire-style bed and dressing table. One could easily believe Abe Lincoln was still asleep there. I'm sad that Vidal has, for various reasons, decided to sell this house; if I win the lottery I may try to buy it.

I visited Graham Greene in Antibes toward the end of his life. I had, on an earlier occasion, stopped by his villa in Capri - that seemed, somehow, more like the author, an exotic outpost in the village of Anacapri. On the French Riviera, he lived in a large, fairly anonymous flat which had few personal touches, although several shelves were filled with his favourite books - Captain Maryatt, James and Conrad, Evelyn Waugh. The flat itself seemed temporary: something anyone might occupy for a brief period. And that was like Greene himself, a transient in this world, someone who loathed being rooted. He had spent his life in transit, shunning England, shifting among continents, women, lives. Somehow, this flat was perfect for Greene: a place he could easily shut up, abandon.

My love of writers' houses is shared by the English painter, John Fisher, who has travelled widely in Europe and Asia over the past few decades, often painting houses where writers lived. In the autumn of 2002, he had a one-man show at the Francis Kyle Gallery in London, where he showed off the result of many years of work in this vein. One painting portrayed the dining room at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's ancestral house, where the author held forth at dinner parties. Another was of Kipling's quintessentially English study at Bateman's, with its deep-set window, heavy curtains, rows of leather-bound volumes, and a writing table that contained his famous pot of India ink. Fisher also showed paintings of Max Gate, Thomas Hardy's house in Dorchester, and Darwin's serene Down House, in Kent. His interest in writers' houses began, he once said, when he visited the "Tante Léonie" house in Illiers-Combray after reading Proust.

Anew show at the Francis Kyle gallery adds to Fisher's growing body of work in this vein (Writers' Rooms II), with interior and exterior paintings of Lamb House in Rye, where James wrote his later novels, and vivid portraits of the studies where Robert Graves worked in Mallorca, where Dickens wrote at Broadstairs, Ibsen in Oslo, and where Chekhov wrote his crystalline stories beneath stained-glass windows at the White Dacha in Russia. There are also some evocative paintings of the sparsely-furnished Martello Tower in Sandycove, Dublin, where Joyce set the opening scenes of Ulysses. The new series contains several paintings of Lampedusa's dusty, beautiful palazzo in Palermo.

In the show's catalogue, Fisher says: "Painting in a writer's house can have a profound effect. A place closely associated with someone you already know, if only through his writings and reputation, has a resonance that acts strongly upon the imagination, all the more so when one is alone in the house."

Fisher's patience, and his willingness to sit for long hours in a writer's house, have paid off handsomely. These are oil paintings on thick paper, although the painter has somehow managed to create a lightness, almost a transparency, in the paint itself (reminiscent of watercolours). With a huge capacity for what Keats once called Negative Capability, Fisher has lost himself in these houses, willing to submit to the vision of another artist. This selflessness has allowed him to enter each distinct imagination with a humble reverence, with a modesty that amounts, in the end, to something like courage.

&middot Jay Parini has published biographies of Steinbeck, Frost and Faulkner. His latest book is The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems (Braziller). John Fisher is at Francis Kyle Gallery, 9 Maddox Street, Mayfair, London W1S 2QE until March 16. Tel: 020 7499 6870/6970.